launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Michael Hudson <michael.hudson@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Bjorn Tillenius wrote:
> Hi guys,
> 
> so, everyone in the To list is listed as being part of the Technical
> Architect team, and now we have to do the hard part and decide when to
> have a weekly meeting :)
> 
> It's tricky, since we're spread across in a lot of different time zones.
> You can see the most extreme ones listed here:
> 
>     http://bit.ly/cgSpXq
> 
> The most troublesome one is Michael :)

There's a surprise!  And it probably gets worse with DST changes over
the next few weeks.

> So, Michael, during which hours
> would you be willing to have a meeting? I'm currently considering having
> the meeting on either UTC Tuesday or Thursday, since I don't have many
> meetings those days.

I'd prefer before core hours to after core hours I guess, on a sort of
sliding scale: 8am would be no problem, 7am would be OK, 6am would be
doable but a bit painful and 5am is past what I'd willingly accept.

> Looking at the different times, it's impossible to have the meeting in a
> time that is convenient for everyone. I propose a couple of options.
> 
>     1. Have the meeting at European evening/New Zealand morning every
>        week.
> 
>     2. Alternate the meeting times between having it like 1. one week,
>        and European afternoon/US morning another week.
> 
>     3. Experiment with e-mail based meeting/discussions.
> 
> 
> FWIW, I'm proposing to alternate the meeting times, since I'm not too
> keen on having it in the evening, after core hours. Better to have it
> only once every two week if necessary. This means that Michael wouldn't
> be able to participate in every meeting, but that's ok, since Code has
> two representatives.

Yes, I'd be fine with not getting up for a 6am call every week :-)

> Let me clarify what I mean with 3. as well. The idea here is to send out
> the meeting agenda via e-mail once a week, at a fixed time. Each team
> representative would respond to information requests in a timely manner.
> The danger here is that there will be long, low-bandwidth, discussions.
> To address that, we would be strict at scheduling phone calls, so that
> interested parties (since often, it's sufficient for only a few people
> to be involved in the discussion) can discuss things in a higher
> bandwidth medium, reporting back the results. I have no idea how this
> would work in practice, but maybe worth an experiment.

A bit like Martin, I think it's possible that discussion via email might
actually work out better.  Maybe the launchpad-dev list would even be
suitable for most of the discussion, perhaps with a [tech] tag that
indicates that members of this team are somewhat obliged to take a
special interest in these mails?

Cheers,
mwh